Justice looms for Doomsday cult that brought death to Tokyo subway

Victims of the 1995 sarin attack on the capital's subway hope for closure
after a long wait as the last member of Aum Shinrikyo cult goes on trial

Kazumasa Takahashi who died in the gas attack is pictured with his familyPhoto: Androniki Christodoulou

By Julian Ryall, Tokyo

10:40AM GMT 16 Jan 2014

Mitsuru Kono hopes that once the executions begin, the nightmares he has suffered for the last 19 years might start to fade.

The legal hearings Thursday in Tokyo against one of the few remaining members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult could also serve to bring closure to a nation that was traumatised by an attack that was as bizarre as it was terrifying: an apocalyptic religious faction that preached armageddon and sought to overthrow the Japanese government but released nerve gas on the subway when its plans were thwarted.

Shizue Takahashi whose husband Kazumasa was killed in the sarin gas attack is photographed on the Tokyo subway (Androniki Christodoulou)

Thirteen people died in the sarin gas attacks and as many as 6,000 commuters required hospital treatment. But the March 1995 attacks were only the final throes of an organisation that had for more than 20 years been convincing the young and the gullible that its leader, Shoko Asahara, was a reincarnated god.

As his church began to disintegrate, police finally pieced together a picture of Asahara at the centre of an organisation that abducted and murdered its opponenets, required members to undergo "religious training" so severe that it had killed several of them, manufactured weapons, truth serums and nerve gas and forced followers to use halluconogenic drugs. It even had ambitions to build a nuclear weapon.

Mr Kono knows that he will once again be afflicted by what his doctors have termed "memorial syndrome" in the run up to March 20 this year, the anniversary of the sarin attacks, and the state of his health may be even more precarious this year as the Tokyo District Court holds the first hearing of the case against Makoto Hirata.

After nearly 17 years on the run, Hirata turned himself into police in Tokyo in January 2012. His mug shot posted in police stations, post offices and train stations across the country, Hirata had been wanted for his alleged involvement in the abduction in February 1995 of a Tokyo notary public looking into the cult's activities.

Kiyoshi Kariya, 68, was taken to the cult's fortress-like compound in the foothills of Mount Fuji, where he was given a home-made truth serum. After apparently dying of an overdose, Kariya's body was incinerated.

Hirata has also been questioned over his role in the sarin gas attack on the subway system two months later and the attempt to assassinate Takaji Kunimatsu, the then-head of the National Police Agency, as the authorities launched their investigation into the cult.

"My health deteriorates every March," Mr Kono told The Telegraph. "My doctors tell me that I need to try to remain calm, to take things very easy and I hope it will not be so bad this year."

But he is not sure that will be possible, given all the media coverage that Hirata's trial will inevitably attract.

Mr Kono, now 72, was was travelling to work in the morning rush hour of March 20 when he was caught up in Japan's worst incident of domestic terrorism. In the third carriage of a train on the Hibiya Line as it came to a halt in Kodenma-cho Station, the first hint that something was amiss was a powerful smell that he describes as being reminiscent of putrefying onions.

Collects of Kazumasa Takahashi who died in the gas attack (Androniki Christodoulou)

"I never saw the attackers or the newspapers that they wrapped around the bags of liquid sarin before piercing them on the train, but the prosecutors showed me photos afterwards and I was only about 15 feet away," he said.

"There was a strong smell and the driver of the train announced that there had been some sort of bomb attack at Tsukiji Station, so I got out onto the platform," he said.

After that, much is a blank.

Mr Kono has hazy memories of getting outside the station, where he passed out. He was in and out of consciousness as he was driven to hospital in a car; the more than 6,000 people affected by coordinated attacks on five trains beneath the city by cult members had overwhelmed the emergency services.

"I was attached to drips and tubes when I came around and I couldn't think," he said. "I could not even remember my own phone number to call my family."

Mr Kono's family eventually tracked him down that evening, but they were unable to see him as he was in an isolation ward.

"They told my wife about my condition. She did not think I was going to survive," he said.

Released after 13 days, Mr Kono is still receiving treatment for internal complications from ingesting the sarin, a nerve agent developed in Germany during the Second World War but classified as a weapon of mass destruction and outlawed by the United Nations.

"Every morning, my feet and my legs and feet are cold and rigid," said Mr Kono, who also has problems with his vision.

But experts say he and the other commuters aboard the trains were fortunate. The sarin had been concocted at short notice in Aum Shinrikyo's laboratories because Asahara, the half-blind founder of the cult, rightly feared the police were planning an investigation of its activities.

If they had been given time to refine the liquid to its most potent, colourless and odourless form, it could have been 70 recent more powerful and effective in a confined space.

The sarin did claim the life of Kazumasa Takahashi, who was a senior member of the staff at Kasumigaseki Station and ingested a lethal amount of the gas as he tried to remove a leaking bag from a train.

His wife, Shizue, has attended 430 hearings involving members of the cult and will be in court for Hirata's apppearance today.

Shoko Asahara (Lt) and Makoto Hirata (Getty Images/AP)

"The bag of sarin that killed my husband was left there by Ikuo Hayashi and in court he said that he did not deserve to live," said Mrs. Takahashi, who heads the Tokyo Subway Sarin Incident Victims' Association. "But I never felt like he made a real apology to us."

Hayashi, a doctor who had graduated from the elite Keio University, avoided the death penalty and is serving a life prison sentence.

"On the anniversary, I will go to my husband's grave and there is a meeting of our group later in the day," she said. "And I will be meeting the media as it is important that this case is never forgotten."

Asahara founded the cult in 1984, melding teachings from Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism with interpretations from yoga and Nostradamus. Declaring himself a reincarnation of Christ, he promised to wash away the sins of his followers and railed against conspiracies against Aum by Jews and the British Royal Family. He also predicted the imminent outbreak of a third World War.

The cult recruited heavily from Japan's top universities, reaching out to young men who were socially inept and seeking to make friends, but who were also experts in engineering and the sciences.

Asahara stood in the general election of 1990 but, after failing dismally at the polls, the cult's activities took a more sinister turn.

Followers of Asahara had already abducted and murdered a lawyer assisting families to free their relatives from the cult, along with his wife and their infant son, before Aum purchased AK47 assault rifles and a Russian helicopter. It was reportedly attempting to obtain the components for a nuclear weapon and its chemists started manufacturing sarin and VX gas in 1993.

Eight people died in a June 1994 attack on a court hearing a case against the cult in Matsumoto and, when the cult realised in the early months of 1995 that a raid on its compound on Mount Fuji was imminent, it went on the offensive.

To date, 189 members have been indicted for crimes ranging from murder to abduction, the production of weapons and creating nerve gas.

Thirteen have been sentenced to death, including Asahara. None of those sentences have been carried out, however, as prosecutors wanted to be able to call convicted cult members as witnesses in the remaining cases.

Hirata and two others will be the last members of the cult to be tried, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty in Hirata's case. Three death row inmates will be testifying during the hearings, which are scheduled to be completed in early March.

And once the final sentences are passed, Mr Kono hopes that the executions are carried out swiftly.

"I lost the life that I used to have because of these people," he said. "Friends ask me why the executions have not been carried out already and it is difficult for me to explain. Almost 20 years have passed already. The executions cannot come soon enough."